I just noticed that a search for "top rated search engines" returns some kind of rating box at the top of the google page... with a completely unrelated result. Has anybody seen this before or know what the story is?
Screenshot here –
http://www.ramblewords.com/2006/06/weird-google-search-result-top-rated/
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looks like something you subscribed to with Google Co-op. |
It's actually a Google Q&A onebox result.
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-04-07-n20.html |
That's the name I couldn't think of. I knew it was a onebox, but it makes no sense. Where are they getting that particular result from for top rated search engine. You would think it would be google/yahoo/msn or something. Not a random site. |
Yeah, they actually mine the whole web for this data, I'm not sure how they do it. It seems they have properties – age, size, population, real name – and then they figure out how to datamine this from natural language with "glue words" – "age of X is Y", "birthdate of X is Y", "real name of...", "population size of...". I'm also covering Google Q&A in my book chapter 16, where I go into the subject of "Permutated Sentences". Quote:
Permutated Sentences
Before Google’s Q&A feature, a fun way to find instant facts was to move around the words of a question sentence until you hit on an answer. To explain, let’s say your question is “When was Albert Einstein born?” We remove the first word, “when”. We’ll now do a search for the several possible rearrangements of the words, and check the Google page count for each:
• “Albert was Einstein born” (0 results)
• “born was Albert Einstein” (0 results)
• “Albert Einstein was born” (17,500 results)
• “Albert was born Einstein” (5 results)
... and so on.
The one phrase search of these returning the most results is our “fact finder.” In this case it would almost certainly be “Albert Einstein was born”, and the continuation of this sentence contains our answer. This can be automated, but takes a while as going through all permutations requires many Google searches. FindForward’s “Ask Question” search (findforward.com/?t=answer) returns the following answer (you can see there are some left-overs from the snippet which aren’t meaningful in this context):
1879, Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 German born American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity.
http://55fun.com |
Yet another good reason for me to stop postponing the purchase of your book. :) |
